POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin crosses the citylord's burning manor — flamespren on the wood, the kitchen fully engulfed — and breaks through the charred cellar door with a Lashed shoulder. The tunnel down is the kind of stormcellar lighteyed families used to ride out highstorms; he used to crawl this very tunnel with Laral when they were children. At the bottom he finds two men manacled to the wall, dead — Jeber, father to boys Kaladin grew up beside, and a refugee he does not know, both with the burned-out eyes of a Shardblade killing. Syl shouts behind him. Moash steps out of the alcove in a sharp black uniform with Roshone held in front of him, knife to the citylord's neck. Before Kaladin can move, Moash opens the throat in one efficient slice; the surgeon in Kaladin knows there is nothing to do. Roshone — the man who consigned Tien to the army — thrashes and is gone. *You came to save him?* Moash asks. *The man who broke your family — and you came down here trying to save him?* He drops his hands and says *I surrender*.
A continent away, Shallan holds herself just on the right side of looking at Ialai's body and works the problem: the Ghostbloods almost certainly have spies among her agents and among Adolin's guards. She turns the wines as her best clue. Bare-footed on the thick rug (her shoes, she explains, were in the way of her thinking), she carries a carafe out to Adolin for a tasting; he names it Shin wine, fermented out of the same odd little berry, *exotic indeed*, and unwittingly gives her the keyword Ialai hung on the rare vintage. She sends Pattern to sweep the room for repeating shapes while she sketches the hutch and rules out hidden compartments by perspective. Pattern finds a band of carvings worn nearly smooth at the base of the wall, in the northwest corner — ten glyphs, one for each kingdom of the shadowdays. The few preserved stones each show a small map; the crescent-mountain shape of Shinovar is unmistakable. The tenth such stone in the corner wiggles loose; behind it, like a bedtime-tale gemstone cache, is a palm-size notebook. Shallan pockets it in her safepouch before Gaz and Red emerge with their pillowcase of letters and ledgers, and leaves with Adolin.
Back in the cellar, Kaladin holds his spear at Moash's throat and cannot make himself move. Moash had been a friend. Moash had been Bridge Four, and Kaladin had vowed under the heavens to protect those men, and had failed him as much as Dunny or Mart or Jaks. They argue old ground — Moash's mercy at the wall in the form of two slit throats, the vengeance for Tien Kaladin never asked for, the king he killed. Moash steps onto the spear. Kaladin shies away. He has been so tired.
His Stormlight runs out at exactly the wrong moment. The numbness he has been shoving down all battle floods up; he sags. The kitchen ceiling crashes far up the tunnel, embers tumbling, and Moash talks softly into the dark. *The chasm, Kal. The rain. That cliff edge you stood on.* The Honor Chasm he told Moash about across firepits in better days, when Moash was a friend and not a man trying to talk him into stepping off it. Moash offers what he says is the gift he gave himself — *I've handed my guilt off and feel none of it; I can lift your hurt off you too* — and asks for one thing in return: that Kaladin admit he is right, and remember the way out every time another of his knights dies. Kaladin's spear slips from his fingers. The smallest, hidden child inside him pulls inward and folds away; Syl is screaming and her voice is only distant wind. He does want to stop hurting. He wants it so badly.
Light bursts into the cellar — clean, white, like a noon sky condensed to a single beam. Moash flinches into shadow; a transparent, taller version of him in a brilliant blue Bridge Four uniform breaks away and steps confidently toward the light, raises a hand, and a Shardspear forms in it. *No!* the real Moash screams. *Take it! Take my pain!* The Blade of the Assassin in White forms in his hands and he swings at empty air, then shoves the doorway-silhouette aside and flees back up the tunnel. Kaladin kneels in the warm light. Renarin resolves out of the brightness — spindly, black-and-blond hair — and slips under his arm. The Fused have retreated; the ship is ready to leave.